A new health committe report calls for politicians to raise their game and end political point-scoring over social care. Photograph: Dave Thompson-Pool/Getty Images

Having identified social care funding as a key general election issue, the main political parties first wouldn't even speak to each other about it. Then when Age UK provided a forum for them to talk, what was shocking was both the acrimony and the low level of their debate.

If anything highlights the poverty of current party political discussion, it is the new commons health select committee report on social care published today. The report calls for fundamental reform of the social care system in England. It provides the first truly radical and far-reaching official statement on the subject. It's headline recommendation is that political point-scoring should end and the parties must find consensus on social care, if another generation is to avoid suffering the indignities and inadequacies of the existing English social care system.

Both the government and the opposition have ruled out the provision of free social care funded from general taxation. But the select committee report concludes that this funding option has many supporters and urges that it is put back on the slate for further debate. It says the existing system discriminates against older people. It is equally dismissive of the government's Care At Home Bill, saying that it "smacks of policy-making on the hoof and risks creating perverse incentives and being substantially underfunded". The report highlights widespread concern about taking money from universal disability benefits like Attendance Allowance to fund discretionary social care services. It stresses the deep division that still exists between health and social care to everyone's detriment.

Instead of going the way of the government's green paper, the report warns us against "demographic despair and alarmism" over the rising numbers of older and disabled people. It stresses that there is still a 20 year "window of opportunity" in which to prepare.

But listening to the narrow and unimaginative proposals of the major political parties, it seems that it is not only consensus that needs to be built, but also vision and imagination. This is unlikely to come from traditional policymakers. What is now crucially needed is the real "big care debate" that the government said it wanted when it published its green paper and then cut across by promising free domiciliary care for those with the highest needs.

Such a public debate must be one that fully and equally involves all the key stakeholders - service users, carers and frontline practitioners, as well as their organisations.This is what has so far been lacking. Such a debate could be the springboard for building the movement for fair social care that will be crucial to knock political heads together. It is difficult to see how else politicians will be pressed beyond short-term solutions to work for the sustainable, equitable and cost-effective social care that people living in our society should have a right to.